The books and series are set in a small, fictional Louisiana town, and the series' premise - that developments in synthetic blood manufacturing have made it possible for vampires to "come out" (of the closet? crypt? coffin?) and live openly in society.

Kind of. Though creator Alan Ball denies that the vampires in "True Blood" are not metaphorical stand-ins for gays or blacks or short people or low-talkers, the blood-suckers in the show are clearly not entirely comfortably assimilated in Bon Temps, La., where some locals remain fearfully fangist.

Whatever. "True Blood" is one zany, sexy, spooky swamp thing. HBO has launched a creepy fake marketing campaign built around the beverage that quenches the vampire characters' blood-thirst.

Location shooting in the Shreveport area has been minimal - most of the action has been shot on Los Angeles soundstages - but the show's cast, which includes Anna Paquin ("The Piano") and Stephen Moyer ("The Starter Wife"), and creator Alan Ball ("Six Feet Under") have spent enough time in Louisiana for the setting to flavor their work.

"For starters, we all had to learn the accent," said Paquin, who with Moyer and Ball met here Thursday with members of the Television Critics Association during the July TV Tour. "So that involved a lot of listening to tapes of people talking from those areas, watching films with the appropriate voices and dialects. And it's amazing how much someone's voice is informed by the situation that they live in.

"And there is a kind of music to the Southern dialect that is very much, from
my outsider perspective, obviously, a product of that very hot, very laid-back at times -- because of that overwhelming heat -- environment. Things move at a different pace, which doesn't mean that it's not really exciting and scary and fast-paced at times. That was a huge part of becoming that character."

"The air down there is different," Ball added. "The light is different because of the moisture content in the air. The greens are very different. And, certainly, the first time I went down, I took my camera, and I took tons of pictures that made me think, 'Oh, we should have a location like this,' (and) 'I know that, in the third book, there is this moment where this happens, and that place would be a great place for that to happen.'"